“... were then unsigned. Individual voices such as Updike’s – and, later, Jamaica Kincaid’s and George W.S. Trow’s – managed to peep up despite the magazine’s horse collar of wry urbanity. A volume of Updike’s Talk from the Fifties sits on my shelf, a memento of a metropolitan flâneur with notepad at the ready, sniffing in the sights.Updike went on ...”

“... do what Baldwin’s friend Eugene Worth did in 1946: he will finally jump to his death off the George Washington Bridge. Baldwin later said that there were no fictional antecedents for Rufus: ‘He was in the novel because I don’t think anyone had ever watched the disintegration of a black boy from that particular point of view. Rufus was partly ...”

“... article.*More curiously, Christine Borland, one of the artists shortlisted for this year’s Turner Prize, has as one part of her exhibition at the Tate Gallery an installation devoted to the Sicilian Dwarf and the Irish Giant. The installation is called After a True Story – Giant and Fairy Tales, and is made up of four pieces, one on each wall. There ...”

“... Milton, the subject of Blake’s own act of self-invasion, was the current project. De Quincey and Turner were targeted as future avatars. Ackroyd’s Blake was a book I looked forward to reading, as the most recent chapter in a story that was unravelling in such a curious way and at such a pace – with virtuous ancients summoned from the aether to bear ...”

“... mansion. The Clyde rises and falls only a few yards from the castle’s back door, and in 1668 Sir George Maxwell sold eighteen acres of riparian land to the city of Glasgow, which thought it was a useful site for a harbour. Shoals and shallows above that point in the river made Glasgow inaccessible to sea-going ships; they usually transferred their cargoes at ...”

“... came on at the launch party for a friend’s novel – William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner – were interpreted as somatic manifestations of envy. But although there were gaps in his treatment, he went on seeing Kleinschmidt for five years. Then, in 1967, he discovered that Kleinschmidt had used material from their sessions in an article for the ...”

“... to use and unsinkable afterwards, and three flushes notwithstanding, the fierce eye of Sir George Solti still came squinting resentfully round the bend of the pan. ‘Better?’ said Mrs Ransome. ‘No,’ said her husband and settled down beside her against the wall. However, finding the skirting-board dug into her back Mrs Ransome changed her ...”